In the mass, a young man suddenly fell down, struck by an attack of epilepsy. His neighbors surrounded him, carried him away from the whirlpool. Others, numerous, left the mob which occupied the esplanade, and ran to see the sight.
"What has happened?" asked Hippolyte, growing paler, with an extraordinary change in her face and voice.
"Nothing, nothing—a sunstroke," replied George, taking her by the arm, and trying to lead her away.
But Hippolyte had understood. She had seen two men forcibly open the jaws of the epileptic, and insert a key in his mouth, doubtless to prevent his biting his tongue. And, at the thought, she felt in her own teeth that horrible grating, and an instinctive shudder shook her to the inner-most depths of her being, there where the "sacred evil" slept with a possibility of awakening.
Colas di Sciampagne said:
"It is someone who has the Saint Donat malady. Don't be afraid."
"Let us go—let us go away!" insisted George, uneasy, dismayed, trying to lead his companion elsewhere.
"What if she were similarly taken, all at once," he thought. "What if the disease attacked her here, in the midst of this crowd?"
A chill ran through him. He recalled the letters dated from Caronno, those letters in which she had made the frightful revelation in hopeless terms. And again, as then, he imagined: "Her hands, pallid and shrivelled, and between the fingers the torn-out curl of hair."
"Let us go away! Do you want to enter the church?"